Join us 7/17 for Internet Independence

WASHINGTON, DC – Internet Independence is the freedom to create, express, and innovate online without asking for permission. It’s what’s made the Internet so great, and what will allow it to continue to evolve.

“No regulation should stand in between an innovative idea and its execution, between companies and customers. And yet the FCC recently adopted heavy-handed regulations to govern the Internet, rules that put regulators and lawyers, not innovators and engineers, in charge of the online world.

“The Internet is the greatest free-market innovation in history, and it was made possible in part by a bipartisan, decades-old commitment that the government would let the free market flourish. I hope the FCC will someday restore that consensus and focus its efforts on what really benefits consumers—namely, more broadband investment, deployment, and competition.”

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, Keynote Speaker

Join us Friday, July 17th to hear from entrepreneurs, advocates, and policy experts who want to restore Internet Independence. Meet the innovators whose products and business models hang in the balance of the FCC’s discretion, and learn what an Internet dependent on government will mean for consumers. The event will also be livestreamed (stay tuned for details).

The event will start with a fireside chat featuring FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, followed by a panel discussion.

Highlights from legal and policy comments filed by TechFreedom and the International Center for Law & Economics on Internet regulation, and our reply comments

About TechFreedom:

TechFreedom is a non-profit, non-partisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policy-makers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.

About Lincoln Labs:

Lincoln Labs is made up of entrepreneurs and technologists who believe that technology and innovation are key ingredients to a more free society. Both online and offline, we actively bring together the most thoughtful minds from the worlds of tech, policy and politics to discuss how best to solve our biggest problems. Through hackathons, meetups, and policy discussions Lincoln Labs is creating and supporting a community of like-minded individuals who desire to advance liberty in the public square with the use of technology.

About Ajit Pai:

Ajit Pai was nominated to the Federal Communications Commission by President Obama. He was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate and took office in 2012 for a term concluding in 2016. Commissioner Pai has wide experience in the public and private sectors. His public sector career spans all branches of the federal government. He served in the FCC’s Office of General Counsel; at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and Office of Legal Policy; at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee; and as a law clerk to a federal judge. With respect to the private sector, he was a Partner in the communications practice of the law firm Jenner & Block and worked as Associate General Counsel at Verizon Communications Inc. Commissioner Pai graduated with honors from Harvard University and from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served on the University of Chicago Law Review.

About Scott Banister:

Scott Banister was an early pioneer in the email business, founding ListBot, an email list hosting service, in 1998, and selling the company to Microsoft in 2001. Banister has since worked with other start-ups as a board member and investor, including PayPal and eVoice, which offered the first email-enabled home voicemail service and which was acquired by AOL in 2001. In 2000, Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider that was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for $830 million. Banister is currently a leading “angel” investor to a variety of Silicon Valley startups.

About Daniel Berninger:

Daniel Berninger is a Washington, DC based independent communication architect. Daniel’s work started with the original assessment of VoIP at Bell Laboratories in 1995, technical contributions to the founding of Free World Dialup in 1996, and continued at VocalTec Communications where he led the first VoIP deployments at Verizon , HP , and NASA. He won a VON Pioneer Award as co-founder of the VON Coalition. Daniel also led the founding teams, created the business model, and recruited the CEO’s for ITXC (NASDAQ: ITXC/Tom Evslin) and Vonage (NYSE: VG/Jeffrey Citron).

About Michelle Quinn:

Michelle Quinn is a Business Columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. Prior to her current role, she was the Silicon Valley correspondent at Politico covering tech policy and politics. She has also covered the tech industry at the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was a blogger for the New York Times. She lives in Oakland with her husband and two children.

Tech Freedom is a non-profit, non-partisan technology think tank launched in 2011. TechFreedom is excited about the future. Focusing on issues of Internet freedom and technological progress, we work to protect innovation and discovery from powers that fear change. Technology is the great driver of social progress and human well-being, and we aim to keep it that way.